Ethics

The ethics in my life has been taught to me mostly by my mom, who is responsible for who I am today. Ever since kindergarten, I’ve been taught to treat others how I would like to be treated. It’s true that the Golden Rule is one of the most important rules.
My mom is a strong believer in karma and she has taught be that if you do the right thing, it will come back to you. I’ve never been a bully, and I feel I have always been welcoming and friendly to people who needed it.

Growing up, I was around my brother a lot, and I saw who his friends were. He used to have a friend in junior high that I hated, and who used to be so mean to me. We would get in actual physical fights and it would end up with him hurting me. I knew that if I was the older sibling I wouldn’t be friends with people that wouldn’t even respect my sibling, or even hurt them. They are not friends anymore, and I don’t know where that guy is now, but last time I heard he was getting into a lot of trouble. I learned what types of friends I wanted to have by seeing what types of friends my brother had.

The basic ethics I have been taught are to be able to differentiate right from wrong. When I see something that I don’t think is right, and I’m sure that my mom wouldn’t think is right, I stay away from it. Of course, I’m a teenager, so I do what I want a lot of the times but I make sure that I am being responsible and not causing harm to anyone.

My peers and friends don’t influence my ethics as much as my family did growing up, because by the time I started making a concrete group of friends, my ethics were already established. However, I know that if I ever do something out of line, my friends will call me out and set me back on track.

Hughes and McKay

The poems that we read in class by McKay were mostly sonnets. They followed a strict style of writing. It was very interesting how McKay wrote his poems this way, because it was a very high level of poetry that requires a certain intelligence that people wouldn’t expect of an African American. McKay wrote sonnets very well to show people that he was educated and intelligent. Sonnets are what people like Shakespeare wrote. It is difficult to write a sonnet because every syllable in every word in every line is important to the poem as a whole. Langston Hughes did not write a majority of his poems as sonnets, but his poems were beautiful as well. His poetry was much more informal than McKay. We read a couple of his poems, including Negro Speaks of Rivers and Theme for English B. In Negro Speaks of Rivers he talks about how his ancestors have seen so much history happen and that he is part of his ancestors because they are in his soul. And all of what his ancestors have done and seen has made his soul grow deep like the rivers. Langston Hughes’s poems were easier to relate to, and although some of his poems were angry, it was productive anger.
In McKay's poem, To the White Fiends, he talks about how the white men have done very evil things to the black man, and the black man is just as capable of doing those same cruel things, but they won’t because they don’t want to be savages just like them. Both of these poets write about what it is like to be a black man through their poetry.